Being the reviews and ramblings of an incurable narcissist with too much time on his hands.

Friday, February 8, 2013

DVD Review: Branded

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…The fuck did I just watch?

I think of the many, many, MANY unintentionally hilarious
moments in this movie, my favorite has to be the moment when Jeffery Tambour’s
character (who, for the record, plays a businessman, who was sent to Russia to
spy on their government, a fact that sustained me throughout much of the first
half of this movie) sums up in dialogue why the movie’s plot up till that point
doesn’t make any goddamn sense. I assume that this bit of dialogue was a script
note from the producers, and it sort of sums up the entire movie:
Intermittently accidentally entertaining, often boring and overall baffling.

I’m going to sum up the plot as best as I can, because I’m
not 100 percent certain of what happened. Okay so, the main character is Misha,
a Russian advertising genius who gets his advertising powers from being struck
by lightning as a kid (roll with it, it’s not even close to the dumbest thing
in this movie). Misha is actually a perfect example of how this movie is
completely unaware of show-don’t-tell as it keeps telling us that Misha is an
advertising genius, when I’m not 100 percent certain he’s not special needs, as
all of the advertising he makes is awful and he acts like a moron. He’s also an
asshole, but whatever. Anyway, Misha is producing an extreme makeover style
show, about a fat woman’s plastic surgery journey, but something goes wrong and
she winds up in a coma. So while Misha goes into self imposed exile, it’s
revealed that all of this was a sinister conspiracy by Max von Sydow’s character
(who I think went a little crazy when Ingmar Bergman died) to increase the
profits of his fast food chain by using this woman’s plight to launch a
worldwide fat-is-beautiful campaign. Oh and Misha has a dream that tells him to
ritually slaughter a cow and bathe in it’s ashes, which gives him the ability
to see brands as sci-fi creatures attached to people (the movie never
completely decides if these are real or just symbolic hallucinations, but I’m
sure I don’t care). Oh and we don’t get to see the dream or figure out any of
the plot twists or character actions for ourselves, as everything that happens
in the movie is described in voice-over by a woman who sounds like she took
enough valium to kill a horse.

This is, without doubt, one of the most surreally awful
films I have seen in a VERY long time. It’s got an incredibly obvious, on the
nose, point to make about how much advertising rules our lives, which it
chooses to make in the most heavy handed way possible, but still manages to be
ridiculously obtuse about it. Along the way it manages to also be oddly
mean-spirited about it’s point, as a good portion of the second act amounts to
the film telling us how awful and disgusting it thinks fat people are. By the
time they’ve gotten off and to their supposed real point the whole ‘body
shaming’ thing, the movie is nearly over. And when they finally get to their
real point and reveals it’s happy ending… holy shit, I can’t remember the last
movie I saw that was pro-censorship.

But fuck that, it’s not what a movie has to say, it’s how
they say it, right? Except the movie is so poorly made that I half expected to
see Tommy Wiseau’s name in the credits. Nothing anyone does makes any sense on
any level, either from real world logic or the movie’s own baffling internal
logic. Max von Sydow’s character keeps dropping in and out of the movie, large
sections of the plot require leaps in logic that would cause Videodrome to stumble and there’s
precisely 0 interest in the movie as a whole. The movie attempts to tie the
narrator into the plot…sort of (the tie in is just plain fucking stupid, no two
ways about it) but I’m not fooled. I guarantee you the narration was a post
productions decision by either the editor or the producer (or both) to try to
desperately to make this shit make sense.

And I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of awful on this
movie. Jeffery Tambour is at least entertaining his role (always nice to see
you George) but Max von Sydow is completely checked out and all of the other
actors are terrible. And even aside from the completely nonsensical plot, the
dialogue is fucking awful, so on the nose and obvious that the narrator
explaining every scene doesn’t even feel that out of place. And then there’s
the weird direction, which strains for Cronenberg style surrealism, but really
just ends up being completely baffling.

The movie this most wants to be is an arthouse version of They Live but it’s not really even fit
to stand in the same room as that particular classic. I briefly entertained the
idea that this movie was a giant troll, as it’s rather meta that a movie about
the evils of advertising had an INCREDIBLY dishonest ad campaign (as in “Haha,
see? Advertising is evil, it got you to see this piece of shit!”) but I think
that’s giving too much credit to the movie that posits that modern marketing
was invented by Stalin. Besides, I’m something of a connoisseur of bad movies (I
own a copy of The Room on blu-ray) so
I can tell when a movie is intentionally trying to be bad, and this is
completely sincere in it’s incredible level of pretention. If you’re into
drunkenly ragging on terrible movies with your friends, then this will probably
work for that, it’s certainly terrible enough. But if you want a movie to enjoy
unironically, on it’s own merits, then stay farrrrrr away from this movie. It
doesn’t really have any merits.

Elessar is a 23 year old
Alaskan born cinephile and he found the fact that supposedly Russian cars had
left hand drivers seat distracting too.